JadoPado gets acquired by undisclosed buyer and shuts down operations

JadoPado has been acquired by a “large regional business” for an undisclosed price. CEO Omar Kassim said that they will be shutting down the JadoPado marketplace immediately, while JadoPado hotcake (their backend seller platform) will shut down on May 25th, 2017.

The announcement was released in a blog post published at noon on May 1, 2017. Details are scant about the buyer or price and Kassim’s post says they have been “sworn to secrecy”.

Kassim called the closure of JadoPado the end of a “grand experiment” and that’s perhaps the greatest insight into the workings of this eCommerce startup. Started in 2010, JadoPado has been moved rather fast and broken (and fixed) quite a few things along the way. It was actually conceived as an eCommerce site for groceries before moving to electronics. In that iteration, JadoPado was a direct seller of electronic products, only selling what they stocked and moving on to larger warehouses as time passed.

JadoPado experimented heavily and frequently. It took away Cash on Delivery before reintroducing it, and the same with Same Day Delivery. At first, JadoPado also managed the delivery themselves before finally dropping that in favor of a partnership with FedEx. Specifically with COD, Kassim seemed to work towards an idealist vision before succumbing to the realities of the market. In its early years, JadoPado grew rapidly as well, recording 200%+ increase in revenue and site visitors.

Finally, at the start of 2015, JadoPado pivoted to a marketplace model. Under this model, JadoPado expanded far beyond electronics and into 5,500 categories. However, even with the marketplace, JadoPado maintained its direct inventory fulfillment model, this time under the JadoPado Direct moniker. It was essentially competing directly with the same resellers that were present on its marketplace platform. JadoPado Direct also featured Business (Corporate Sales, Education, and Government) and Trade (Export and Wholesale) divisions – essentially traditional sales with offline sales teams.

With time, however, JadoPado Direct was shut down quietly, completing the transition to a complete marketplace. Under the marketplace model, JadoPado changed pricing models for sellers a few times. It started as a percentage model and its latest iteration changed to a fixed fee model with a transaction fee. This latest iteration was a result of hotcake, its backend seller platform. JadoPado had split into two – the JadoPado Marketplace and JP Hotcake. It was possible that Hotcake could’ve been used as a tool for sellers to list their products on other marketplaces as well.

This brings us to today – the acquisition and shut down of JadoPado. Through its six-year journey, JadoPado has taken on various forms. Each change and pivot were the work of a team willing to experiment with the product, even if it meant discarding a lot of the work done before. For the most part, the JadoPado team did deliver a better product with every iteration. It will be interesting to see what comes next from this team.